Toshiba Portege G900 Review

Camera interface

Camera:

As almost all other phones on the market nowadays, the Portege G900 comes with built-in digital camera. The lens is located on the back in a circular window, where also the flash is hidden. It starts for whole 5 seconds after the (shortcut) button is pressed which is very slow, and shows interface in either portrait or landscape orientation. It can be rotated according to your taste, and unlike the G500 in both cases the text menu will be correctly oriented. The options allow you to choose the white balance (environment) setting or apply color effects. There are 3 levels of compression (quality) and 5 resolutions (sizes) for the pictures, with the biggest being 1600x1200 pixels or total of 2 Megapixels.

3 seconds are needed to save a picture of the highest possible quality which is way better result than the start. The quality of the images is what is expected from that type of camera – the detail is average, the colors have slight purple nuance but are relatively close to the real and the exposure is correct most of the time. Indoors the quality decreases with the reducing of the light, and best results will be obtained in bright room. The phone has a flash, but like almost all LED flashes is not of great benefit.




Multimedia:

Portege is equipped with the standard mobile version of Windows Media Player. It is a multimedia player for music and video files. MP3 format is supported, as well as WMA and WAV. After updating the library with files, all supported types are found, and they can be added to playlists. This function is not well implemented and organizing them is quite hard. Songs can be viewed by artist, album and genre, as these are taken from the ID3 tag of the files.


The supported video formats are MPEG4/H.263, WMV and 3GP, while the quality of the latter is pretty low. They can be viewed in fullscreen but the high-resolution screen shows that the quality of this videos is not enough. Although the processor is not very fast, we are happy that no frames are skipped. Unfortunately you cannot playback video in MPEG 4/H.264 format which gives the best results. We tried to play WMV movie with resolution near to the one of the G900’s display (848x496) but what we got was a frame in a few seconds, not a video. Unfortunately the processor of the G900 cannot play videos that would suit the display as they are big in size.

The options buttons (next/previous, Play/Pause, etc.) are small and inconvenient both during Music and Video playback. When audio files are played, the video visualization window is still displayed, which is a lapse as it only takes up place on your screen. You can have these problems solved by adding new skins for the Media Player or by using another music player.

Although the speaker is located on the back, which is the reason the quality and volume decrease when the phone is put on a table. The speaker isn’t powerful and you will easy miss a call if a song is set as a ringtone and you don’t feel the vibration.

To listen to music we would prefer to use headphones connected to the 2.5mm stereo jack or wireless ones using Bluetooth and A2DP profile.

MS Word file	Excel sheet	PowerPoint file

Software:

The Toshiba G900 has 128MB ROM and 128MB RAM while most other PPC phones have 64 MB ROM. Internal memory capacity can be expanded through the miniSD card slot.


WM for PPC provides unlimited capabilities for installing software. The only restrictions are the memory available and the hardware of the phone. The first problem is easily solved by getting a memory card as there are miniSD cards with capacity of up to several GB. Every WM6 Professional phone comes with programs that are modified, “pocket” versions known PC applications. Such programs are the mobile versions of (Microsoft) Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Internet Explorer, Explorer, Media Player, etc. The Office applications allow you to view and edit documents of the most-used types and the phone opens them without any error. Even a complicated Excel document with a few sheets is not a problem. Unlike many other PPC phones, the G900 doesn’t come with PDF reader but one can be installed later. Many more programs could be downloaded from third party sources, too as this is a smartphone.

There are numerous programs created for this platform, almost as much as the ones intended for PCs with Windows operating system. The most popular are the various utilities for personalizing the PPC, multimedia players, file explorers, Instant Messengers, etc. You can download third party applications to be used instead of the preloaded ones.

We thought that G900 won’t be able to run most of the applications for this OS, but it is not so. We tried Skype, Agile Messenger, Deepfish and they ran with no problem. A game designed for QVGA and VGA displays opened and used almost the whole screen but we experienced problem with TomTom 6 which didn’t work on the large display.